Gabriel Boric says the initiative, which will be sent to Congress later this year, is designed to boost the economy of the nation, which has some of the world’s largest reserves of the high-demand metal.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric announcing his plan to nationalize the country’s lithium industry on April 20, 2023. (Gabriel Boric/Twitter)
Chile’s President Gabriel Boric, in a televised address to the nation last month, announced his plan to nationalize the country’s lithium industry to boost the economy and protect the environment:
“Chile has one of the largest lithium reserves in the world. It is a mineral that, being in electric bus and car batteries, is key in the fight against the climate crisis, against climate change. It is an opportunity for economic growth that will be difficult to beat in the short term. Together with the development of green hydrogen, it is the best chance we have at transitioning to a sustainable and developed economy. We can’t afford to waste it.”
Boric said that his national lithium policy includes the creation of a state-owned company, which would eventually take control of the country’s lithium mining sector from private industry giants.
In this regard, he added that future lithium contracts would only be issued as public-private partnerships, with full state control. The government would not terminate current contracts, he said, and expressed the hope that companies would be open to state participation before the contracts expire.
The head of state added that the plan includes encouraging the use of new technologies to minimize the impacts of mining on ecosystems and promote research through a salt-flat protection network. For this purpose, he announced that a National Institute of Lithium and Salt Lakes would be created.
Laguna Verde in Chile’s mineral-rich Atacama region. (Lucash, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Boric said that future lithium exploration would be undertaken with the participation of all Indigenous communities residing near the extraction zones and reliant on local water basins for their livelihoods.
He said his plan not only promotes extraction and conservation, but also encourages generation of lithium products in the country. The plan will be presented to the Congress in the second half of the year.
“We will send a bill to create the National Lithium Company to Congress. It will look for partners to develop value-adding projects. This implies making an additional effort to not only extract raw materials, but to convert them into new products with high technological value. We can do it in Chile,” he said.
“Our challenge is for our country to become the world’s leading lithium producer, thus increasing its wealth and development, distributing it fairly while protecting the biodiversity of the salt flats,” he said.
The Tara Cathedrals (left) and the Tara salt flat in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile. (Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Chile has one of the world’s largest lithium reserves and is the world’s second largest producer of the metal after Australia.
Albemarle and SQM, the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 lithium producers, respectively, are the two companies that currently hold licenses for lithium exploration, mining, and exploitation in the Atacama salt flat in the north of Chile. SQM’s contract is set to expire in 2030, and Albemarle’s in 2043.
Lithium is highly sought worldwide for the manufacture of batteries. Its demand is predicted to increase as much as 40-fold by 2040 due to the global energy transition.
Latin America will play a key role in this shift. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the region is home to an estimated 60 percent of the identified lithium reserves globally, with Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil accounting for some of the largest reserves.
[The political ramifications for Chile’s move remain to be seen. Following the 2019 coup that overthrew Bolivia’s democratically-elected president Eve Morales, Elon Musk, whose business depends on lithium, tweeted: “We will coup whoever we want to. Deal with it!”]
Don't forget: After the US-backed coup against democratically elected socialist President Evo Morales in Peru's lithium-rich neighbor Bolivia in 2019, billionaire oligarch Elon Musk boasted:
"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it"https://t.co/AsNQOdDZER pic.twitter.com/sTVXiZulZ8
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 19, 2023
This article is from Peoples Dispatch.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Vera – Is there a bottom to capitalist greed?
Lithium is the new oil. Elon Skum (the most publicly subsidized Oligarch in history?) and the rest of the capitalist oligarchy (BlackRock etc.) will rake off even more billions in windfall profits. States like California will mandate new electric vehicles.
But what is the environmental destruction of lithium mining on such a vast, unprecedented scale? What is the “carbon footprint” of manufacturing millions of new vehicles and trashing millions of the old ones? This is an oligarch’s dream: mandate the public to buy your products and price-gouge the hell out of them. And what’s more: get the public to SUBSIDIZE your operations for even MORE profits. This is an investment opportunity of a lifetime, and it will “save the planet”. Yeah, that’s the ticket…
The US might have to “regime change” some countries who might get in the way of the new Green Capitalist revolution, but that’s a form of public subsidy as well.
I suppose these rockets use lithium:
“Debris blast from SpaceX rocket launch faces environmental scrutiny
The most powerful rocket ever built destroyed its launchpad and sent a plume of concrete dust and rubble into the air”
Reuters
Fri 28 Apr 2023 01.36 BST
Don’t step on Yanx toes…
Haven’t they stole enough already???
But is this fair to the guys on Wall Street and in the City of London?
“Latin America will play a key role in this shift. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the region is home to an estimated 60 percent of the identified lithium reserves globally, with Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil accounting for some of the largest reserves.”
And the will suffer indigenous genocide and environmental death.
Do not be fooled.
The ‘public-private partnership’ has nothing to do with socialism or the betterment of anyone’s life.
As Butch Lee argues in his 2017 book: Night-Visions: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain:
“The transformation to a neo-colonial world has only begun, but it promises to be as drastic, as disorienting a change as was the original european colonial conquest of the human race. Capitalism is again ripping apart & restructuring the world, and nothing will be the same. Not race, not nation, not gender, and certainly not whatever culture you used to have now.”
“The previous capitalist world order was bipolar, with everyone visible massed around opposing poles of oppressor vs. oppressed. It was colonized vs. colonizer, white vs. black, invader vs. indigenous.
The growing chaos of the neo-colonial world order is that many different peoples—armed with conflicting capitalist agendas—have been loosed to fight it out…
Trans-national capitalism is driving a certain kind of breakthrough idea, a “multicultural” worldview in which each people and grouping is freed and encouraged to explore its own capitalist agenda no matter what form it takes…Everyone is free to go for it, free to fight it out any way they want so long as they don’t endanger the system itself.”
In the context of this series, neocolonialism describes the shape-shifting nature of contemporary imperialism that absorbs and capitalizes on the emergence of new politics and identities.
Subgroups are assimilated into capitalism and bonded to imperialist interests, all for the purpose of maintaining material colonial domination.”
Butch Lee has described neocolonialism in our current times very well. I agree with his last paragraph…”Subgroups are assimilated into capitalism and bonded to imperialist interests, all for the purpose of maintaining material colonial domination.” I live in Chile and the entire world has it’s eyes on our area of the world. I do not see what Boric wants to do “private public partnerships” will be any good for our citizens or our beautiful environment. This is all part of the WEF’s 2030 Agenda including their Sustainable Goals. These are not good for the world. The only ones making out on all of this are the corporations and the elite of the country. Sadly, most people in Chile have no idea what their government is doing. The government owns the media so controls the narrative. FYI- Whitney Webb who lives in Chile has written many good pieces on these subjects so I encourage everyone to follow her on Unlimited Hangout.
Keep in mind, we also have a new constitution being written by the Congress. May 7th we vote for the committee that will write our new constitution, to take the place of the Pinochet Constitution and then the people will vote on it in December. These potential committee members were voted in by the Congress, not the people. The right has the majority and many of them are still Pinochetists. This is not what the people wanted when they originally voted for a new constitution by more then 80%- the latest poles show only 49% want a new constitution. They never wanted the corrupt government to do what they are doing now. We cannot believe that anything good will come from the new constitution nor the raping of our lands and the destruction of our citizens, especially the indigenous people whose lands are being destroyed or their water taken from them because we are in a severe drought in those areas. I hope Consortium News will follow what occurs in Chile with these topics. Thanks for the article because so little is written about Chile.
“In this regard, he added that future lithium contracts would only be issued as public-private partnerships, with full state control. The government would not terminate current contracts, he said, and expressed the hope that companies would be open to state participation before the contracts expire.”
More crtel capitalist rhetoric.
There cannot be a public private partnership: it is an oxymoron.
Profit seeks profit and only profit.
To think one can partner with monopolies under global capitalism is now called ‘the left’.
Boric himself is questionable as a president.
Much like Spain or Greece, Boric seems more like a ‘plant’ than anyone who cares about Chileans.
He has walked back half of his campaign promises and now works with the US like the good boy he is.
I totally agree with you! We voted for Boric thinking Antonio Kast, the right-wing Pinochet lover would be so much better, and I still believe that. At least Boric would have those parties of the far left, like the communist and some of the socialist people pushing him to the left. Sadly, Boric has moved further right, with Bachelet and Piñera now melded into his party. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, one of the worst war hawks visited with Boric a few months back and they came up with projects to work on together. This is when I knew he had gone to the dark side. One never makes so-called deals with the Devil. I do think that having the claws of the US Empire around his neck, he knows if he doesn’t go along with them in some respects he will be removed and someone worse will be put in his place. Someone the US can control. With President Lula firmly in place, we may move further away from the US Empire’s grip of Latin Am. and using the SUR to do business transactions. This may be our saving grace but I don’t see Boric moving in that direction. I just don’t see this ending well for us, unless the majority of Chilean’s can rise up like they did in Oct 2019 and take back their government from all the neoliberals in all the parties. Time will tell if that happens.
I’m just really glad I’m old enough that I won’t live to see or through what life on this planet is destined for.
Same here, Paula!
This is great news. There needs to be an alliance of So. American countries not beholden to the US imperium that’d be strong enough to dissuade US dirty tricks/provocations and any attempts to foment regime change. …….Still, you can be sure US imperial managers are working overtime to handle all the, ahem, ‘global threats to US, er, freedom and democracy’. Russia! China!! ……… and now these countries with valuable rare earth minerals/material who think they should be developed for their own peoples’ benefit. How dare them!.
….. Elon Musk’s “we’ll coup whoever we want” speaks for the entire oligarch class. ……The US military is the enforcement arm of the mafia regime, aka, the US Government.
The decline of the US empire, thankfully, seems to be accelerating. De-dollarization is gaining steam. For the sake of global stability it can’t happen soon enough.
Great, accurate comment & I agree!